Free Practice Materials Installment #1

In an attempt to make my website more informative, I will be uploading one practice document each week at least through the end of the summer on my resource page here. Each document will be a pdf file consisting of one or two pages of practice problems or questions with answers provided so students who wish to study on their own can take advantage of free study materials. A blog post will accompany each document to explain the strategy. Please see below for the first installment. Enjoy!

The SAT® Writing section is the easiest of the three sections of the SAT® to improve. On average, my students improve 80 points on the Writing, with many students jumping over 100 points from one test to the next. The reason for this is the narrow slice of grammar that the SAT® actually tests. Grammar is a huge field, but if students can focus and study the types of questions the SAT® tends to emphasize, they do better.

One major question type is the dangling modifier. These questions are difficult to sound out, but if we know the rule they are easy. Please see below for an example.

INCORRECT: Because he studied for a long time, the test was easy for John.

As this is written, it makes it sound like the test studied for a long time, which is illogical. John is the one who studied for a long time, so it should be re-written like this:

CORRECT: Because he studied for a long time, John found the test to be easy.

Please see Dangling Modifiers Practice 1 for additional practice questions and answers. Whenever we see an introductory phrase and the rest of the sentence is underlined, we always want to first check what the introductory phrase is describing or modifying and make sure that that noun is the subject of the second half of the sentence.